Indian Premier League: Story of the Kolkata Pitch

IPL’s weekend match at Kolkata was supposed to be a magnanimous occasion where Shah Rukh Khan’s Kolkata Knight Riders was to take on Hyderabad’s Deccan chargers. To the surprise of everyone from - Symonds to Ganguly, the pitch was found to be cracked and the ball was behaving erratically from the first ball! By the end of the match, only 222 runs were scored and 15 wickets were taken in the 40 overs - much below the usual 400 that one sees in an average T20 match. Even the captain of the winning Knight Riders team, Ganguly expressed sock over the quality of the pitch.

As usual, the blame game between officials started. The Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) blamed the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) and CAB put the ball back to BCCI’s court. The curator did realize that his team has made a ‘cracker’ of the pitch, and expressed his apologies to both the teams for doing so. BCCI has also set up a committee with CAB and the technical committee of BCCI to investigate into the pitch. The committee will come out with a report before the next match on April 29th between Sourav Ganguly’s Kolkata Knight Riders and Sachin Tendulkar’s Mumbai Indians.

Let us hope we get the Eden garden back to where it belonged on the quality of cricket pitches - on the top!